Re: [screen-devel] Why not nonblock by default?

[Juergen Weigert]

Uh, 
difficult matter....

In case of a slow line, e.g. dialup line (bandwidth) or overloaded line 
(high latency) we'd like screen to wait a bit and try to get the display right.

It is also an annoyance to users, when the scrollback buffer of their 
xterm/konsole/gnome-terminal does not contain *all* text. 
This requires 'nonblock off'.

(On the other hand:
 The current full blocking default also has the downside that as soon as an
 application becomes I/O-bound, screen becomes quite nonresponsive.
 $ cat hugefile
 CTRL-C
 CTRL-C
 ...
 may be difficult to interrupt.
)

I believe that nonblock is not the correct solution for fixing 
hung write() calls.  

I'd suggest screen should have an alarm() over each write()
and switch to nonblock, when the alarm() fires.
With a prominent Msg() saying so, as soon as the display works again.

        cheers,
                JW-


On Mar 05, 09 23:17:42 -0800, Micah Cowan wrote:
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> Does anyone know, is there any particular reason why we don't make
> nonblock the default? It's an annoyance to users when a display gets
> hung and any windows connected with it get stuck, especially since
> novice users are unlikely to realize that "nonblock 1" won't affect the
> buggered display, and may not think to do C-a : at % nonblock on
> 
> I'd like to propose that the default value for defnonblock be changed
> from "off" to something like, I dunno, 8 ? Or lower, if there's no
> particular reason why we shouldn't.
> 
> - --
> Micah J. Cowan
> Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
> Maintainer of GNU Wget and GNU Teseq
> http://micah.cowan.name/
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